1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of telecommunications and, more particularly, to a telecommunications voice server.
2. Description of the Related Art
The information age has heralded advancements in data accessibility that alter the manner in which people interact socially and economically. Information tools like personal data assistances (PDA's), Web-enabled mobile telephones, computers, vehicle navigation systems, and the like can immerse users in pools of information designed to avoid inconveniences and to generally ease hardships inherent in hectic lifestyles. For example, information tools can help users avoid traffic, maintain social contacts, receive important business email when away from the office, and the like. A key component of the technological infrastructure providing these capabilities includes voice server systems which provide a multitude of speech services, like automatic speech recognition services, synthetic speech generation services, transcription services, language and idiom translation services, and the like.
Implementing robust voice servers in an extensible, cost efficient manner has been a daunting challenge to service providers. Speech technologies are constantly changing and can require vast hardware and software resources. For example, natural sounding speech generation is commonly performed by concatentative text-to-speech (CTTS) engines, even though hundreds of megabytes of information can be required for storing the phonemes associated with a single CTTS voice, and even though significant processing resources can be involved in constructing synthetic speech from these phonemes. Providing other speech services provides similar challenges. For example, natural language interpretation within ASR engines can require vast neural networks to interpret speech input with reasonable accuracy.
As if these complexities were not enough, telecommunication protocols, call management services, and telephony features must be managed by a voice server that provides speech services for telephony communications. That is, conventional voice server systems include call session management features, remote access capabilities, lifecycle management, load distribution, and other telephony related features that are typically handled internally for performance reasons. Performance of a voice server can be significant because voice services are often required for real time and near-real time tasks making appreciable processing delays problematic. It would be highly advantageous, if telecommunication related features of existing telecommunication application servers could be leveraged by voice server systems so that these features need not be separately implemented within voice server systems.